The main problem isn't obsolete software, but hardware. Changing routers to some that support IPv6 isn't done over night. And even if you do, and get IPv6 assigned, it doesn't help unless your provider also supports IPv6 -- else you might as well be tunelling the old way anyhow.

What's so awful about that? OK, so it's not native, but none of your apps or services can tell the difference. The advantage is that when you do get native connectivity, you've already done your testing and you're ready for the world.

I ask this because I honestly don't know. How many routers on the net are embedded devices capable of receiving firmware updates to cope with the additional functionality? Or, how many full-fledged "router in a box" style server systems are capable of receiving software updates, or already support IPV6?

Part of the problem is that, even though most routers can get software updates in the field, older models only have hardware accelerated IPv4 support. If you upgrade these routers to IPv6, they have to do everything with their puny CPU, which means the same router can handle fewer IPv6 packets than IPv4 packets.

You've got your assertions pretty much backwards. Most general-purpose computers are IPv6-compatible, running either Windows XP (or occasionally Vista) or Linux or MacOS, though the user may not have a clue how to enable it or manage it and their ISP help desk may not know either. There are two different kinds of hardware that have problems with IPv6, for different reasons:

Home NAT/Firewall boxes, which may not be upgradeable, and which the user almost certainly didn't save the instructions for even if

"To sticketh" is not grammatically correct. The "to" signifies that we are using an infinitive of the verb, yet the "-eth" is a finite ending. -eth is simply the original form of the -s suffix on verbs: it marks the singular third person present tense. So "he sticketh", "John sticketh" are fine, but "have to sticketh" is not.

The phrase "begs the question" has an intuitive meaning which is understood by any English speaker even if they've never encountered the phrase before. The fact that the intuitive meaning is "wrong" is irrelevant. The "correct" meaning is only going to be understood by those who study philosophy or logical fallacies, i.e. a specialised field. It's further complicated by the fact that there are other terms such as "circular argument" which mean much the same thing (and are typically used when people are tryi

They don't do dynamic IP addresses because they don't have enough addresses. They do it for stopping you from running a server on your home computer. Sure you can still run a server, but it's harder to run one when your IP address keeps changing.

IP changes, in my experience from both Comcast and Verizon FIOS, are so rare that they effectively don't happen. I've never had a change with FIOS from the day the service was fired up, and although I can't recall ever having my previous Comcast one change except when I physically moved, its possible it did once or twice.

If they want to block servers, they'd block inbound ports.

Dynamic IP addresses are used because its the only possible way to do it without having techs setting up every joe six pack or grandmothers computer.

Dynamic IP addresses are used because its the only possible way to do it without having techs setting up every joe six pack or grandmothers computer.

Hell, I find they make life simpler for us geeks too. I went into my router set up, clicked a button to say this lease is permanent and unless I change my network card (aka MAC address) it'll still get the same IP even if I wipe the system clean. Much, much simpler than setting it up manually.

I think the parent should be modded up (at least a little). For a moderate sized network having ip addresses handled by dhcp (meaning almost zero client configuration) combined with a local dns server (for internal lookups) means that you can essentially control how everyone in the network gets access to ip based resources all from a single configuration (ok, well two configurations).

Obligatory "me too." I've had Verizon DSL for over 5 years now, and I think my IP has changed once in all that time. While it's technically a DHCP-assigned address, in practice DHCP nearly always assigns the exact same address when the lease is up, and you end up with a (non-guaranteed) static IP. I can't speak for other ISPs, but Verizon is good that way.

IP changes, in my experience from both Comcast and Verizon FIOS, are so rare that they effectively don't happen. I've never had a change with FIOS from the day the service was fired up, and although I can't recall ever having my previous Comcast one change except when I physically moved, its possible it did once or twice.

My IP changes every time I reconnect. If I tell my router to drop its connection then reconnect straight away I never get the same IP. As to why my ISP do this I have no idea if it is to stop me running a home server or not, but I do know they throttle bit torrent traffic. Personally I don't mind them throttling torrent traffic if it means I can play online games with no lag.

Back on topic I would like to say that for about as long as I can remember we have been very close to the limit of IPv4 addresses. Wi

Dynamic IP addresses are used because its the only possible way to do it without having techs setting up every joe six pack or grandmothers computer.

DHCP can be used to assign static addresses and it would be transparent to the end user.

Reasons they don't:

1) Possible admin overhead (automatic assignment needs to handle non-contiguous blocks, returned IPs, etc)2) Why waste the time on this? Is a static IP guaranteed as part of your service?3) We can charge for static IPs!

My ISP actually does offer DHCP to assign static addresses - my package comes with no less than 8 static IPs, and if I wanted to I could use DHCP for them.

In reality, I have an OpenBSD box acting as a router with static IPs (and NAT, natch), and on the other side I have . . . static IPs distributed over DHCP because it's just plain easier. My computers have static IPs, friend's laptops get assigned dynamic IPs, everything works.

Man, I had mod points YESTERDAY... but parent is right. That IP may have been dynamically assigned to you the first time you used the service and has never changed. Just because it doesn't change now doesn't mean they won't change it to some other DHCP settings later if they need to, which *may* change your IP. For example, I have Cox here in Tulsa, my IP rarely changes, but to ENSURE it never changes, no matter what, I have to pay like about another $15-$20 a month.

No. It's the only sane way to allow for changes in network address assignments and for zero-configuration networking on machines. In larger installations it also allows for essentially statistical multiplexing; not every computer hooked up to the network is going to be on at the same time, so the total number of addresses needed is lower than the number of computers.

They do. Because I have a list of about 110 addresses on my mail server that gets 3-4 messages a day, I was blocked "because your computer has a virus", smtp both inbound and outbound. Mailhop outbound and mailhop relay from dydns fixed the problem for now by letting me run on a different port.

I bunch of people said the same thing but I don't want to reply to all of them.From the customers standpoint, the different doesn't really matter except as an inbound DNS address, however managing static IPs via DHCP is still complicated because you can't easily move machines around subnets as the leaves of your network change in terms of device concentration and data load.

You pay more for a static IP address because once you have it, they have to adjust the network around you.

If I recall correctly, you don't get routable IP Addresses from AOL, you get stuff in the 172.16.0.0/12 address range. Net requests are then all run through some form of proxy or NAT out to the real net.

What makes you think they are going to start giving you a free static IP just because they transition to IPv6? Right now most providers charge for a static IP, they have no reason to give away a revenue stream.

First of all--this is great news. We need breaks from the past like this. Maybe we'll see computers natively handle 128-bit words. UUIDs are already there. I'm sure the custom networking hardware already has it down, but this could be something that drives it. 128-bits seems like overkill for addressing, but it could be put to use as well.

Why in the world was the parent modded offtopic? IPv6 addresses are 128 bits in length. He was wondering if their use would eventually lead to CPUs with 128-bit native words. That seems ontopic enough for me.

There are tunnel brokers who will give you an IPv6 address now, and tell you how to create an IPv6 over IPv4 tunnel and keep it up. I've got one public server already set up on IPv6 by tunnel.

Some ISPs are starting to offer native IPv6, as well. My ISP from when I lived in France, Free.fr, offers 30Mbit/2Mbit ADSL with unlimited calling to 40 odd countries with 300 odd channels for 29.99 Euros. They just added IPv6 addresses for those who request them. Makes my Optimum Online ser

When Google decides to support it and when your ISP decides to support it. My university is natively IPv6 connected, and for any of the few places that have IPv6 running I use IPv6 on stock Vista 64 bit, no changes necessary. Client and server OSs, routers/switches and a lot of applications support it just fine today. Our FTP mirror syncs some distros using rsync over IPv6, and there are some public audio streaming servers and random other resources on the net, although presently precious few.

Yeah, but when could that happen? Seems to me that part of the 'transition process' would be to start people using IPv6 addresses instead of IPv4, even if the actual "behind the scenes work" is done on IPv4.

And actually, something else occoured to me. When will we be able to request an IPv6 IP from our ISP, so we don't have to deal with having Dynamic IP's?

I don't know, but I just wrote an email to mine asking about it. If everyone starts bugging them, it might get something done. It would help to hint that you might move to a competitor if they get IPv6 support first. (Assuming you have more than one available.)

Also, write to "the other guy", and tell them that you might switch if they offer IPv6. Balking about things here on Slashdot don't do much; writing to companies and backing it up with you wallet does.

You don't need IPv6 to give every light bulb you own its own IP address. You just need to use a private address space. The biggest one is 10.*.*.*, which should be plenty for any (relatively) sane person.

You should do it that way anyway, or else somebody is going to hack into your Christmas ornamentation and do evil things.

There are some people who don't even have their own public ip address. These people are surfing by sharing the same ip address with thousands of other people and only thing they have in common is that they don't live in the USA and they have the same ISP.

Actually, you probably wouldn't assign them static IPv6 addresses. It's much more likely that they would use IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration [ietf.org] (btw, www.ietf.org is an Ipv6-accessible site), to obtain an address automatically.

That's odd, I can't seem to ping your toaster... Its almost like a route doesn't exist... Unfortunate!

You and your kind (those ignorant of IP networking and the concept of true end to end connectivity) may enjoy non-routeable addresses, but I happen to like the flexibility that incoming connections permit.

I could rant about all the things your lousy NAT setup breaks but arguing about this over and over again is just getting tiresome.

You both have points, but why the hell do you need to access his toaster or would he need to access yours? NAT gives him the flexibility to decide which outside connections get forwarded without a separate set of firewall rules for the internal and external networks. Despite the totally internetworked ideal some people have, people will still use NAT with IPv6. It won't be for lack of addresses, but for (ab)using the lack of routing in place of a proper addition of firewall rules.There are other nice things

What is so difficult about adding a default rule to your firewall that blocks all incoming connections to your subnet and then adding rules specifically for the devices and services that do require incoming connections?

ie) deny ip from any to 2610:78:ad::/48

With NAT you are eliminating the possibility of incoming connections, with IPv6 you can deny connections all you want but can allow incoming connections where required or desired. Sure you can setup a port forwarding rule to allow a service for a given machine, but what happens when you need the same service to go to more than one host? You know need to accommodate for that by changing the incoming port on your real IP.

Not to mention all the issues raised by protocols that embed IP's that are not routable within the protocol themselves (take the SIP protocol for example). Work-arounds need to be put in place for many protocols on an individual basis in a NAT'd environment. This is a pain in the ass that would be highly unnecessary in a post IPv4 world.

If you're so fond of the kludge that is NAT, nobody is stopping you from using NAT with IPv6 in combination with a non-routable unique-local prefix (fc00::/7).

Dragging your feet on adoption of a superior technology that works for every situation in favor of a broken setup that happens to meet YOUR rather limited requirements is delaying progress for the rest of us.;)

Generally speaking the consumer world isn't ready for IPv6 yet anyway (Too many Windows machines with limited IPv6 capabilities)... but I still get annoyed with all the anti-IPv6 commentary by those that have not fully investigated the specifics.

Just the personal pet peeve that is looking forward to moving behind the network design of choice for the 1980's.

What is so difficult about adding a default rule to your firewall that blocks all incoming connections to your subnet and then adding rules specifically for the devices and services that do require incoming connections?

ie) deny ip from any to 2610:78:ad::/48

How about the fact that to the average user it's complete and utter gibberish? That's pretty difficult.

With v6, you've unnecessarily exposed something that you don't exactly want open, and would have to firewall every single device connected to your "wonderful" new world of everything connected to v6.

You seem to be arguing that a NAT router in front of your network is easier than having a firewall with a default deny policy in front of your network. Then you go and point out that pretty much all NAT routers also function as firewalls. So... you're complaining that IPv6 requires you to have a device in front of your network to manage access, which you already have and need for IPv4 NAT anyway.

With a firewall that drops all incoming traffic to addresses you don't want expo

With v6, you've unnecessarily exposed something that you don't exactly want open, and would have to firewall every single device connected to your "wonderful" new world of everything connected to v6.

At least v6 gives you the flexibility. Only an idiot would leave everything open. The idea is that you have an implicit deny for the entire network that you have and then only poke holes when you need them. At least then everything's routable. NAT is a kludge. Nothing more. It needs to die a swift death.

Well there are more people in the world than there are IPv4 addresses, and in many countries, there are more cell phones than people. It would be quite reasonable to have every cell phone ultimately having its own IP address. Add to that your work and home computer, your work and home telephone and so on, and you see why we need more IP addresses.

common to see examples that attempt to show that the IPv6 address space is absurdly large. For example, IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion people[1] alive today. In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every star in the known universe [1] - a million times as many addresses per star than IPv4 supported for our single planet. These examples, however, have an underlying and inco

No, no, chances are, I am NOT behind a firewall or proxy, I am trying to correct a post on a board that is too goddamn old-school, its own admins don't know how to fix it to offer modern features, like editing posts.:rolleyes:

No, no, chances are, I am NOT behind a firewall or proxy, I am trying to correct a post on a board that is too goddamn old-school, its own admins don't know how to fix it to offer modern features, like editing posts.:rolleyes:

I don't care how "modern" the ability to edit posts is. It's utterly stupid, and messes up every single forum that uses it. When you say something publicly, you've said it. If you don't want to say it then don't publish it in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But will it require boiling the oceans [wikipedia.org] to fully populate IPv6 space?

No, but you could make a good effort of trying.

Both ZFS and IPv6 are 128-bit systems. Populating an IPv6 address can probably be defined as a one-bit operation, unlike the multiple bits required for each ZFS block allocation. Adjusting his math for a one-bit allocation of an IPv6 address gives us an energy of 3.06x10^24 J, and thus 1.3x10^18 kg of water. This works out to 13 million km^3 of water that we can boil. This is roughly comparable to the volume of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and Mediter

I'm just hoping the Enemy Territory server I play on doesn't move too quickly to the switch to IPv6. It took me ages to load their map rotation, but it's a good selection and their bots are a nice challenge. It has taken me months already to remember the 216.27.112... wait, is it 112.48, or 48.112 at the end? And that 27 doesn't look right. It ends in:27962, I know that. Or is it:27964?

For some reason many gamers (or game server admins) don't seem to realize its possible to use DNS. A few years back, I was running a Medal of Honor server and would confuse the hell out of people by telling them the server address was, for example, moh.mydomain.org. A number of folks wouldn't accept that at all and insisted on using the actual IP address.

So, we've got lots of IPv6 addresses, thus we can assign static IP's to everything. Catch: IPv6 addresses aren't very readable/memorable. I can remember all of the IPv4 addresses on my network, but I wouldn't remember the v6 ones.

So, what's the solution there: well there's DNS and DHCP... man I hate DHCP. What if my local DHCP server or DNS server goes down? And, then I try to ping it to diagnose... oh, if only I could remember its address!

IP addresses:I can't remember my IPv4 addresses without looking them up, so I'd be no worse off than with IPv6. You'll get older too son, then you'll agree with me:)

As for web hosting providers, they won;t ever have to 'change your IP address', they'll just have to tell you it in the first place, then you're done.

In both cases, IPv6 supports auto-registration so you won't have to fiddle with it anyway. As the IETF says [ietf.org] "Since IPv6 addresses are too long to remember and EUI64-based addresses are too complicated to remember, they are not suitable for such identifiers"

IIRC you don't need DHCP anymore with stateless autoconfiguration.

NAT:think for a moment what NAT does. All you have is your router attached to the internet, and all your computers connected to the router. Unless you explicitly allow incoming connections to pass through, your PCs are "firewalled" at the router.

If you have IPv6, you'll still have the router. I hope that all router manufacturers will be shipping them with incoming connectivity disabled by default, just like it is at the moment. Then, you'll be no less secure with IPv6 than you are today.

You will have the benefit of being able to "DMZ" as many of your PCs as you like, not just one of them. This is best of both worlds.

I think IPv6 will be a good thing, if it ever happens. I can't see that happening anytime soon though, there's too much infrastructure out there.

When i think of the subnets i've used/worked in, i tend to believe that remembering ipv6 addresses isnt going to be that hard in reality.Ok, they're long - but in my head right now i can remember 4 subnets, work, previous work, home and the university i went to. Now i tend to think in terms of subnets. For example lets say my home is 192.168.1.0/24, my router is 1, my dns is 2, my mailserver is 3, my printer is 4, etc etc. The bit at the front replacing the 192.168.1 may have got alot bigger, but i still on

Also, it's fairly common practice to not use autoconfigured or throwaway addresses for things such as gateways and DNS servers. Then you end up with::1. Depending on your network, the prefix is going to always be the same, or only have a few changing portions, so suddenly the addresses are a lot more manageable.

"it will finally be possible for two internet hosts to communicate without using IPv4 at all."
DNS has nothing to do with enabling to IPV6 hosts to communicate on the internet... it only provides name resolution. The routers make it possible for 2 IPV6 hosts to communicate... you just do so by using their IPV6 address instead of the name..

its called a routing table..
DNS is only domain name resolution, it ties easy to remember names to ip addresses. Regardless of whether those are IPV6 or IPV4.
If you have the IP of an IPV6 and you have an IPV6 IP address, and all the routers in between you have complete routing tables, you can reach that other host no problem. DNS doesn't even get involved.
The same way DNS doesn't get involved if I try to reach google by going to:
http://64.233.187.104/ [64.233.187.104]

The idea with IPv6 is that the address space will be large enough that we will never have to transition to a 256-bit (or greater) address space. Rather than build an "intermediate" 64-bit address space, the intention was to prevent any future exhaustion of IP addresses by using a very large space.

will 256 be far off

Given that IPv6 would provide over 10^28 addresses for each of the 6.5 billion inhabitants of Earth, I think it will be sufficient for the foreseeable future.

I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.

I belive that they skipped the 64-bits address to be able to fit the 48-bit MAC (Level 2) address inside the IP (Level 3/4) address, and thus avoiding the need for the router to use ARP to find the MAC address corresponding to a local IP address.

Not even close. Those bottom bits are used for the completely optional autoconfiguration feature. You're equally welcome to hand-configure hosts or use DHCP6 to assign network::1, network::2, network::3 and so on without regard to MAC.